Other Colors Read online

  ALSO BY ORHAN PAMUK

  Istanbul

  Snow

  My Name Is Red

  The White Castle

  The Black Book

  The New Life

  CONTENTS

  Preface

  LIVING AND WORRYING

  1. The Implied Author

  2. My Father

  3. Notes on April 29, 1994

  4. Spring Afternoons

  5. Dead Tired in the Evening

  6. Out of Bed, in the Silence of Night

  7. When the Furniture Is Talking, How Can You Sleep?

  8. Giving Up Smoking

  9. Seagull in the Rain

  10. A Seagull Lies Dying on the Shore

  11. To Be Happy

  12. My Wristwatches

  13. I’m Not Going to School

  14. Rüya and Us

  15. When Rüya Is Sad

  16. The View

  17. What I Know About Dogs

  18. A Note on Poetic Justice

  19. After the Storm

  20. In This Place Long Ago

  21. The House of the Man Who Has No One

  22. Barbers

  23. Fires and Ruins

  24. Frankfurter

  25. Bosphorus Ferries

  26. The Islands

  27. Earthquake

  28. Earthquake Angst in Istanbul

  BOOKS AND READING

  29. How I Got Rid of Some of My Books

  30. On Reading: Words or Images

  31. The Pleasures of Reading

  32. Nine Notes on Book Covers

  33. To Read or Not to Read: The Thousand and One Nights

  34. Foreword to Tristram Shandy: Everyone Should Have an Uncle Like This

  35. Victor Hugo’s Passion for Greatness

  36. Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground: The Joys of Degradation

  37. Dostoyevsky’s Fearsome Demons

  38. The Brothers Karamazov

  39. Cruelty, Beauty, and Time: On Nabokov’s Ada and Lolita

  40. Albert Camus

  41. Reading Thomas Bernhard in a Time of Unhappiness

  42. The World of Thomas Bernhard’s novels

  43. Mario Vargas Llosa and Third World Literature

  44. Salman Rushdie: The Satanic Verses and the Freedom of the Writer

  POLITICS, EUROPE, AND OTHER PROBLEMS OF BEING ONESELF

  45. Pen Arthur Miller Speech

  46. No Entry

  47. Where Is Europe?

  48. A Guide to Being Mediterranean

  49. My First Passport and Other European Journeys

  50. André Gide

  51. Family Meals and Politics on Religious Holidays

  52. The Anger of the Damned

  53. Traffic and Religion

  54. In Kars and Frankfurt

  55. On Trial

  56. Who Do You Write For?

  MY BOOKS ARE MY LIFE

  57. The White Castle Afterword

  58. The Black Book: Ten Years On

  59. A Selection from Interviews on The New Life

  60. A Selection from Interviews on My Name Is Red

  61. On My Name Is Red

  62. From the Snow in Kars Notebooks

  PICTURES AND TEXTS

  63. Şirin’s Surprise

  64. In the Forest and as Old as the World

  65. Murders by Unknown Assailants and Detective Novels

  66. Entr’acte; or, Ah, Cleopatra!

  67. Why Didn’t I Become An Architect?

  68. Selimiye Mosque

  69. Bellini and the East

  70. Black Pen

  71. Meaning

  OTHER CITIES, OTHER CIVILIZATIONS

  72. My First Encounters with Americans

  73. Views from the Capital of the World

  THE PARIS REVIEW INTERVIEW

  TO LOOK OUT THE WINDOW

  MY FATHER’S SUITCASE

  PREFACE

  This is a book made of ideas, images, and fragments of life that have still not found their way into one of my novels. I have put them together here in a continuous narrative. Sometimes it surprises me that I have not been able to fit into my fiction all the thoughts I’ve deemed worth exploring: life’s odd moments, the little everyday scenes I’ve wanted to share with others, and the words that issue from me with power and joy when there is an occasion of enchantment. Some fragments are autobiographical; some I wrote very fast; others were left to one side when my attention was elsewhere. I return to them in much the same way that I return to old photographs, and—though I rarely reread my novels—I enjoy rereading these essays. What I most like are the moments when they rise above the occasion, when they do more than just meet the requirements of the magazines and newspapers that commissioned them, saying more about my interests, my enthusiasms, than I intended at the time. To describe such epiphanies, such curious moments when truth is somehow illuminated, Virginia Woolf once used the term “moments of being.”

  Between 1996 and 1999 I wrote weekly sketches for Öküz (Ox), a magazine devoted to politics and humor, and I illustrated them as I saw fit. These were short lyrical essays written in one sitting, and I very much enjoyed talking about my daughter and my friends, exploring objects and the world with fresh eyes, and seeing the world in words. Over time, I have come to see the work of literature less as narrating the world than “seeing the world with words.” From the moment he begins to use words like colors in a painting, a writer can begin to see how wondrous and surprising the world is, and he breaks the bones of language to find his own voice. For this he needs paper, a pen, and the optimism of a child looking at the world for the first time.

  I gathered up these pieces to form a totally new book with an autobiographical center. I discarded many fragments and shortened others, taking only excerpts from my hundreds of articles and journals and assigning quite a few essays to strange locations that seemed to fit the arc of that story. For example, the three speeches that have been published as a separate volume in Turkish and many other languages under the title My Father’s Suitcase (containing the Nobel lecture of the same name, as well as “In Kars and Frankfurt,” the speech I gave to mark the German Peace Prize, and “The Implied Author,” the speech I gave at the Puter-baugh Conference) appear here in separate sections to reflect the same autobiographical story.

  This edition of Other Colors was built from the same skeleton as the book of the same name first published in Istanbul in 1999, but the earlier book took the form of a collection, while this book is shaped as a sequence of autobiographical fragments, moments, and thoughts. To talk about Istanbul, or to discuss my favorite books, authors, and paintings, has for me always been an excuse to talk about life. My New York pieces date from 1986, when I was visiting the city for the first time, and I wrote them to record the first impressions of a foreigner, with Turkish readers in mind. “To Look out the Window,” the story at the end of the book, is so autobiographical that the hero’s name might well have been Orhan. But the older brother in the story is, like the older brothers in all my stories, evil and tyrannical, bearing no relation to my real older brother, şevket Pamuk, the eminent economic historian. When I was putting together this book, I noticed with consternation that I had a special interest in and predisposition toward natural disasters (the earthquake) and social disasters (politics), and so I left out quite a few of my darker political writings. I have always believed there to be a greedy and almost implacable graphomaniac inside me—a creature who can never write enough, who is forever setting life in words—and that to make him happy I need to keep writing. But when I was putting this book together, I discovered that the graphomaniac would be much happier, and less pained by his writing illness, if he worked with an editor who gave his writin
gs a center, a frame, and a meaning. I would like the sensitive reader to pay as much attention to my creative editing as to the effort I put into the writing itself.

  I am hardly alone in being a great admirer of the German writer-philosopher Walter Benjamin. But to anger one friend who is too much in awe of him (she’s an academic, of course), I sometimes ask, “What is so great about this writer? He managed to finish only a few books, and if he’s famous, it’s not for the work he finished but the work he never managed to complete.” My friend replies that Benjamin’s oeuvre is, like life itself, boundless and therefore fragmentary, and this was why so many literary critics tried so hard to give the pieces meaning, just as they did with life. And every time I smile and say, “One day I’ll write a book that’s made only from fragments too.” This is that book, set inside a frame to suggest a center that I have tried to hide: I hope that readers will enjoy imagining that center into being.

  LIVING AND WORRYING

  CHAPTER ONE

  The Implied Author

  I have been writing for thirty years. I have been reciting these words for some time now. I’ve been reciting them for so long, in fact, that they have ceased to be true, for now I am entering into my thirty-first year as a writer. I do still like saying that I’ve been writing novels for thirty years—though this is a bit of an exaggeration. From time to time, I do other sorts of writing: essays, criticism, reflections on Istanbul or politics, and speeches. But my true vocation, the thing that binds me to life, is writing novels. There are plenty of brilliant writers who’ve been writing much longer than I, who’ve been writing for half a century without paying the matter much attention. There are also the great writers to whom I return again and again, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, and Thomas Mann, whose careers spanned more than fifty years…. So why do I make so much of my thirtieth anniversary as a writer? I do so because I wish to talk about writing, and most particularly novel writing, as a habit.

  In order to be happy I must have my daily dose of literature. In this I am no different from the patient who must take a spoon of medicine each day. When I learned, as a child, that diabetics needed an injection every day, I felt bad for them as anyone might; I may even have thought of them as half dead. My dependence on literature must make me half dead in the same way. Especially when I was a young writer, I sensed that others saw me as cut off from the real world and so doomed to be “half dead.” Or perhaps the right term is “half a ghost.” I have sometimes even entertained the thought that I was fully dead and trying to breathe life back into my corpse with literature. For me, literature is a medicine. Like the medicine that others take by spoon or injection, my daily dose of literature—my daily fix, if you will—must meet certain standards.

  First, the medicine must be good. Its goodness is what tells me how true and potent it is. To read a dense, deep passage in a novel, to enter into that world and believe it to be true—nothing makes me happier, nothing more surely binds me to life. I also prefer that the writer be dead, because then there is no little cloud of jealousy to darken my admiration. The older I get, the more convinced I am that the best books are by dead writers. Even if they are not yet dead, to sense their presence is to sense a ghost. This is why, when we see great writers in the street, we treat them like ghosts, not quite believing our eyes as we marvel from a distance. A few brave souls approach the ghosts for autographs. Sometimes I remind myself that these writers will die soon and, once they are dead, the books that are their legacy will occupy an even more cherished place in our hearts. Though of course this is not always the case.

  If my daily dose of literature is something I myself am writing, it’s all very different. Because for those who share my affliction, the best cure of all, and the greatest source of happiness, is to write a good half page every day. For thirty years I’ve spent an average of ten hours a day alone in a room, sitting at my desk. If you count only the work that is good enough to be published, my daily average is a good deal less than half a page. Most of what I write does not meet my own standards of quality control. These, I put to you, are two great sources of misery.

  But please don’t misunderstand me: A writer who is as dependent on literature as I am can never be so superficial as to find happiness in the beauty of the books he has already written, nor can he congratulate himself on their number or what these books achieved. Literature does not allow such a writer to pretend to save the world; rather, it gives him a chance to save the day. And all days are difficult. Days are especially difficult when you don’t do any writing. When you cannot do any writing. The point is to find enough hope to get through the day, and, if the book or the page you are reading is good, to find joy in it, and happiness, if only for a day.

  Let me explain what I feel on a day when I’ve not written well, am unable to lose myself in a book. First, the world changes before my eyes; it becomes unbearable, abominable. Those who know me can see it happening, for I myself come to resemble the world I see around me. For example, my daughter can tell I have not written well that day from the abject hopelessness on my face in the evening. I would like to be able to hide this from her, but I cannot. During these dark moments, I feel as if there is no line between life and death. I don’t want to speak to anyone—just as well, since no one seeing me in this state has any desire to speak to me either. A mild version of this despair descends on me every afternoon, between one and three, but I have learned how to treat it with reading and writing: If I act promptly, I can spare myself a full retreat into death-in-life.

  If I’ve had to go a long stretch without my paper-and-ink cure, be it due to travel, an unpaid gas bill, military service (as was once the case), political affairs (as has been the case more recently), or any number of other obstacles, I can feel misery setting inside me like cement. My body has difficulty moving, my joints get stiff, my head turns to stone, my perspiration even seems to smell differently. This misery is likely to grow, for life is full of things that conspire to keep a person from literature. I might be sitting in a crowded political meeting, or chatting with my classmates in a school corridor, or eating a holiday meal with my relatives, struggling to converse with a well-meaning person of unlike mind, or occupied with whatever is on the TV screen; I can be at an important business meeting or making an ordinary purchase, making my way to the notary or having my picture taken for a visa—when suddenly my eyelids grow heavy and, though it is the middle of the day, I fall asleep. When I am far from home, and so unable to return to my room to spend time alone, my only consolation is a nap in the middle of the day.

  So yes, the real hunger here is not for literature but for a room where I can be alone with my thoughts. In such a room I can invent beautiful dreams about those same crowded places—those family gatherings, school reunions, festive dinners, and all the people who attend them. I enrich the crowded holiday meals with imagined details and make the people themselves more amusing. In dreams, of course, everything and everyone is interesting, captivating, and real. I make the new world from the stuff of the known world. Here we come to the heart of the matter. To write well, I must first be bored to distraction; to be bored to distraction, I must enter into life. It is when I am bombarded with noise, sitting in an office full of ringing phones, surrounded by friends and loved ones on a sunny seashore or at a rainy funeral—in other words, at the very moment when I begin to sense the heart of the scene unfolding around me—that I will suddenly feel as if I’m no longer really there but watching from the sidelines. I’ll begin to daydream. If I’m feeling pessimistic, I think only about how bored I am. Either way, a voice inside urges me to go back to the room and sit down at the table.

  I have no idea how most people answer such voices, but my manner of response turns people like me into writers. My guess is that it turns us more typically into writers of prose and of fiction than of verse. Here, then, is a bit more insight into the properties of the medicine I must make sure to take every day. We can see now that its active ingredients are boredom, real life,
and the life of the imagination.

  The pleasure I take in this confession and the fear I feel speaking honestly about myself—together they lead me to a serious and important insight I would now like to share with you. I would like to propose a simple theory that begins from the idea that writing is a solace, even a remedy, at least for novelists like me: We choose our subjects, and shape our novels, to suit our daily daydream requirements. A novel is inspired by ideas, passions, furies, and desires—this we all know. To please our lovers, to belittle our enemies, to extol something we adore, to delight in speaking authoritatively about something of which we know nothing, to take pleasure in times lost and remembered, to dream of making love or reading or engaging with politics, to indulge in one’s particular worries, one’s personal habits—these and any number of other obscure or even nonsensical desires are what shape us, in ways both clear and mysterious…. These same desires inspire the daydreams to which we give voice. We may not understand where they come from or what, if anything, our daydreams may signify, but when we sit down to write it is our daydreams that breathe life into us, as wind from an unknown place stirs an aeolian harp. One might even say that we surrender to this mysterious wind like a captain who has no idea where he’s bound.